Monetization Strategies Examined

The Das Tal site is featuring an interesting new blog post by David Wells that talks about various ways games in the MMO space have monetized development. Wells writes about the pros and cons of crowd-funding, free to play, 'buy once' and subscription revenue models before wrapping up the piece with a look at how the Das Tal team currently sees monetization.

...we have been throwing around an idea for a way that we can let people pay for the type of game world that they want to play on. The idea is still in its early stages, but we are considering letting people put money towards launching servers with rulesets that are voted for on the forums.

Other than that, we have thoughts of a simple buy once model, with a limited cosmetic cash shop, similar to Dota 2, while removing any elements of ‘random drops’ that push people to mass purchase things like treasure chests.